Developing Kids Requires Loads of Patience

Show Transcripts:

Intro:
Welcome to the Father on Purpose Podcast, featuring author and ministry leader, Kent Evans, and business executive and military veteran, Lawson Brown. This is a show for you, dad, you want to be a godly and intentional father. Unfortunately, you’ve turned to these two knuckleheads for help. Let us know how that works out for you. Before we begin, remember this, you are not a father on accident, so go be a father on purpose. Please welcome your hosts, Kent and Lawson.

Kent Evans:
Hey, Lawson.

Lawson Brown:
Hi, Kent.

Kent Evans:
Welcome aboard, man.

Lawson Brown:
How you doing?

Kent Evans:
I’m doing great. You’re two weeks away from moving into your new house, huh?

Lawson Brown:
Yep, that’s what they’re saying. The date is set, the closing is set. It sure doesn’t look like they are going to be able to complete it all, if you go walk through the house. It’s like, Okay, well, you know more than me, but where’s the refrigerator and are you going to paint all this area? I’m sure … Man, these guys do it-

Kent Evans:
Should there be a floor here? Should there be a floor where I’m standing?

Lawson Brown:
These guys do it-

Kent Evans:
For a living.

Lawson Brown:
It’s all they do and they’re really good at it, so I trust them. But yeah, we’re excited. Two weeks from today, we will be in.

Kent Evans:
Oh, that’s awesome.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah. It’s going to be good.

Kent Evans:
Well, hey, today we’re going to take a bit of a stroll down memory lane. I want to tell you a brief story, Lawson, before we dive in, some of the guys might find interesting. I am 51-years-old and I was baptized when I was 21-years-old. For the really smart people listening to this podcast, they could probably do the math, that we’re coming up on my 30 year baptism anniversary.

Lawson Brown:
All right.

Kent Evans:
And this is how … I want to take us back about 30 years, because that’s part of the topic of our conversation today. And this Friday night, at the time we’re recording this podcast, I’m a few days away from speaking at a men’s event. It’ll have about eight or nine churches that are participating at this men’s event. The men’s event is in Lexington, Kentucky, and that is where I went to college and that is where I was baptized. I’m speaking at an event almost exactly 30 years after being baptized in the same city and it goes a step further, Lawson. That’s not all. Just wait. Don’t buy now, there’s more. One of the churches that is attending, they’re bringing a dozen guys to this event. There’ll be maybe a hundred, hundred and some odd there total, and one of the churches coming and bringing guys is pastored by the guy who baptized me 30 years ago.

Lawson Brown:
Wow. Look at that.

Kent Evans:
What are the odds?

Lawson Brown:
Man oh man. Yeah, that is that’s bananas that it has all worked out like that. I mean, think back 30 years ago and who in the world could have predicted what this coming Friday is going to be for you?

Kent Evans:
Yes.

Lawson Brown:
That’s pretty cool, man. I’m glad for you.

Kent Evans:
Which is a pathetic segue attempt at something that we wanted to talk about. You sent a metaphor across … The way Lawson and I, by the way … This is a little shop talk for those of you who want to see how we put this podcast together, and for the rest of you who are wondering, do you guys do any prep work? I didn’t know that even happened.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah, right.

Kent Evans:
One of the ways we do it, is we use an online tool, Airtable, amazing tool, love this tool, and I’ll throw in an idea, and then Lawson will go in and delete my idea. Then Lawson will throw in an idea, and then he’ll put five stars on it, and tell us it’s the most important one we should ever do. But you put in an idea recently and you and I hadn’t even talked about it. I just went into the shared drive one day and I looked at it and thought, oh, what a great metaphor for being a dad. And so, we’re going to use this metaphor today. And the reason I wanted to tell the whole 30 year ago story, is because you kind of got to dial back about that far in your memory banks to get all into the metaphor.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah.

Kent Evans:
Lawson, get us started.

Lawson Brown:
I’ve wondered how much of our audience is old enough even to know what we’re talking about because-

Kent Evans:
Back when I was a kid.

Lawson Brown:
I know. I don’t want to be that, but … I mean, iPhones have been around for now, what two decades, almost or at least 15 years? Yeah, you got to go way back. I’m thinking back to when I was a kid or a teenager, where … The reason I brought up iPhone is because today we have our cameras are on us at all times, and you take a picture, and it’s instant. But the way it used to be, was you took a picture … Yeah, here we go. You took a picture with this little device and that’s all that thing did. You had maybe a count of pictures that you were going to be able to take, 24 pictures at a time, so you were careful. Whereas today, you just snap, snap, snap, nonstop. And then you took that little device to a place, like a Kodak store, handed it to them, and then they did something with it, and we didn’t really know what it was. And then you’d come back. They’d give you-

Kent Evans:
Put it in the magic box.

Lawson Brown:
Come back in five days, seven days and you could then get your picture.

Kent Evans:
Wow.

Lawson Brown:
You got to open the little, you remember this-

Kent Evans:
I do.

Lawson Brown:
You open the envelope, and you start flipping through the pictures. And out of those 24, there might have been six that you would want, that you would want to keep, and you had no control. You didn’t really understand what was going on at the time of taking the picture. You hoped for the best. And then when you get them back, you get to see the end result. Well, what happened was, they went into something called the darkroom.

Kent Evans:
Yes.

Lawson Brown:
The camera specialist person knew what to do, and they would go back there and cut out all the light, and open the camera, and remove the film. And if the film hit light, then it was all ruined. And so, that dark room of development was kind an interesting metaphor for what I have felt sometimes, just not only going through, but fatherhood, and raising kids, and being a dad, has been a bit like you do some things and then it feels like your eyes are … You know, you’re feeling around in the dark maybe a little bit, to find your way and to figure it out. And then down the road, could be months, could be years, you get to then witness the end result. That was the concept of the darkroom of development. That’s just a silly metaphor, but it does have some things that you could use it to think through about life and about fatherhood. Every metaphor runs aground at some point.

Kent Evans:
Well, yeah, at some point the metaphors do break down. However, one thing I love about this metaphor, is it hits on a topic where I’m really bad, and that’s the topic of patience. No one would … If they said, “Hey, if you went and found 10 of my friends and said give me a word that describes Kent Evans.” And of the four words remaining we can say in a podcast because the other six might not be appropriate for little ears, patience would not be one of those words. No one would go, “Oh, golly. Kent. He just, what a patient man. He’s so patient.” That would not probably be the first word. Actually, you know what? That’s not true. They would actually say patient, but it would be impatient.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah.

Kent Evans:
You’d have to cut out the first couple of letters, but they would say, “He is so impatient.” If you just blipped it out correctly, it would sound like they said, “He’s so patient.” You mentioned this scripture as we were prepping in our sheet here, Lawson, it’s in First Peter, chapter one, verses six and seven. It says, “In this, you rejoice.” That’s basically in salvation. “You rejoice. Though now for a little while, if necessary, you’ve been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it’s tested by fire, may be found a result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” This idea in verse seven is that it’s the tested genuineness of your faith. And I don’t know about you man, but dude, as a dad, there are moments where I’m like, I’m just going to have to let the clock tick a little bit here because I feel like I’m doing all that I can do in the life of this child and they’re at a stage, or a moment, or a crisis, or an event where man, the only thing that’s going to make this any better, is we’re going to have to let some water run under this bridge. That’s what, I think, ties us back to this idea of the darkroom of development, what’s going on inside there, we can’t always see what’s going on, but we do have to trust that God’s up to something. That connects back to our faith, right?

Lawson Brown:
Yeah. It does. I mean, the darkness or whatever, that’s just because back then, that’s how they developed film. But to your point, it’s tempting and I guess it’s a struggle … Well, it is for me. I’m impatient as well. It’s a struggle to not … Because we have the ability to get so much at our fingertips, just super quick results. Use the iPhone if you’d like or the phone camera. You take a picture, you immediately see it. We click on the Amazon button, you can get things same day. It’s just the beauty of a modern first-world economy that we get to get things really quickly. And so people like us, our impatience is compounded because we just get used to it. And I think as a father, I look back and can remember sometimes that in those moments we felt pretty dark and do have to … we’re pretty, we felt pretty dark and you do have to … The only option I felt relief from, was the reliance on God. And I think that what it says, the test of the genuineness of your faith gets worked on. That doesn’t just appear. The more of them you go through, the more tests he shows himself, he proves himself. You feel in the dark, and then the light is upon it, and you get to see. You get to see the fruits of his labor. You get to see the result of your prayers. And so for guys who struggle with impatience, like we do, if you can find a way to understand that God works through time, through development, by sometimes stretching it out on purpose, he could fix it. He could fix it immediately, but there’s reason behind everything that he does. And sometimes I think time is a useful tool, a useful factor in the way that he is developing the genuineness of our faith.

Kent Evans:
Oh, man, no question. Well, there’s a parallel passage in James, chapter one, where he says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” I look at that word, steadfastness, and it really means patience, long-suffering, hanging in there, Galatians 6:9, “Don’t grow weary in doing well.” And it says that steadfastness will have its full effect. There’s this thing that God’s doing when things don’t go according to our speed, and that is steadfastness, like a germ that he’s placed in our lives, and it’s working in a positive way. And one of the things it’s producing is that it says we’re going to be perfect and complete lacking in nothing. And when we see perfect in the New Testament just means complete or whole. And so, I guess another way to look at that is without trials that test our patience, we’re going to be imperfect. I’m thinking of a time, Lawson when I was walking through a challenge with one of my sons in his mid-teen years. And I don’t want to exploit my kids on the podcast, so I’m going to veil some of the details because they might listen to this and they wouldn’t want all their dirty laundry aired and neither would I. It wasn’t even dirty laundry. It was just a challenge that he was walking through. And during that season, I remember thinking, at various moments in that stretch of months, “Man, I’m not sure I’m making this any better. I’m not sure I’m helping. What I know for a fact, is that I’m hurrying, that I want this over.”

Lawson Brown:
Oh, wow.

Kent Evans:
The main reason I wanted it over, was not because I love my kid so much and I just want him to be past all of his trials.

Lawson Brown:
Right.

Kent Evans:
The reason I wanted it over, is because it was inconvenient. It was a pain in the rear end.

Lawson Brown:
Right. For you.

Kent Evans:
Exactly. Exactly. I don’t know if you figured this out yet, Lawson, but basically my whole life, okay all things come back to Kent Evans. But for sure, man, all it revealed in me, is a deep impatience. Right? And the impatience sometimes we look at it like, oh well that’s aggressive, that’s being aggressive, and let’s go get them, and carpe diem, and take that hill. But really, usually, at least in my life, you can comment, but my life is when I’m impatient, I am being prideful and selfish, and I’m not trusting the outcome to God. I think now, this is the outcome. It should happen now. And God’s going, you may get a one-star outcome right now and if you just shut your fat mouth and wait a few months, you get a five-star outcome. I’ve got this. Sometimes it’s more of a test of even my faith in what God’s up to, than just using the word patience or impatience.

Lawson Brown:
Interesting. Has there been a time, I’ll give you a minute because this wasn’t in any of the show notes to talk about in advance, but a time where you actually were patient and were reminded how maybe …

Kent Evans:
Hurry up and ask the question already. Hurry up.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah. How good that is for you. Here’s what I’m thinking. I used to think way back then, go back to the darkroom, I pictured it being this dark, peaceful, quiet place. The guy back there in the darkroom was just this patient person. He or she was alone and there was no sound, just doing his work, a kind of art, like an artist.

Kent Evans:
Yeah.

Lawson Brown:
And I remember thinking, I bet it would be very cool in there. I bet it’d be neat to be in there for a while. And so, reflecting on that image has there been a time where you were given this peace from God through some trial time, that you knew you had to be patient and you felt it. Maybe it wasn’t of your own, but to my analogy of being in that dark, peaceful, quiet, cool room where you’re alone with your thoughts, you just focus on this one thing, you get through it. Has there been a sweet spot of learning in your fatherhood life, where you can think of, that you rested in patience?

Kent Evans:
I think of a category, not so much of a specific moment in time, and here’s what I mean by that. I have learned that when your kids are under the age of 10, you do a lot of telling, right? You just, “Get in the bathtub. Stop it. Put your sister down. Don’t set that on fire.” You do a lot of telling. It’s all commands. And what I’ve learned is, over some age, it’s not some magic moment, but over some age, 10, 11, 12, 13, you get a lot more mileage out of asking good questions. And sometimes, we have to ask a question that we’re willing to let just rattle around in their head for an hour, or a day, or a month. I’ve made my peace with that when it comes to patience. Every now and then, I’ll ask my sons a question. I have all boys and I’ll ask my sons a question. I know the answer won’t be immediate, but I also know that just the mere presence of the question in their heart will do some cool work. Right? And it’s not me or question, it’s the holy spirit. I’ll ask them a question like, “Hey, what kind of relationship do you want with your brother when you guys are 25 or 30?”

Lawson Brown:
Right.

Kent Evans:
And a lot of times, if that question comes up, I just let it go. And I just go, “Here’s the thing. You don’t even have to tell me. I think I know the answer. I don’t need the answer. I think you need the answer. And what you got to ask yourself is, am I planting those seeds today? The kind of relationship I want in a decade or two, am I planting those seeds today?” And so what I’m learning is, I’m learning that the patience around asking them bigger questions, higher leverage, more strategic life questions, definitely has its way of playing itself out over time, in ways that often even surprise me. And the other thing I’ve noticed about trying to become a more patient dad, is this idea of going back in time when I was their age, and how I have told each of my boys, I think at least, I don’t know, half a dozen times, “Hey man, I’m trying to coach you through this year of your life and I’m trying to set you up to win and keep you on track. But I need you to know that your version of 15 is way better than my version of 15. I was so off track at 15.” And then, I try to bring that back to speaking life and encouragement into their heart and saying, “Look, man, you’re doing this 15-year-old thing way better than I did.” The reason that connects for me to patience is, I just trust that’s going to work itself out. They’re making pretty good choices at 15, and 16, and 17, way better choices than I was making. Therefore, I’m going to just patiently let some of that stuff play out and see where they end up at 18 or 19.

Kent Evans:
Hey dad, do you wrestle with anger? Man, I sure have and so have thousands of other dads in our email list. And so what we did for those dads and for you, we built a special digital course called the Anger Free Dad. This digital course is chalked full of almost 50 assets, a bunch of teaching videos, a ton of PDF booklets and worksheets, so you can walk through and understand your anger triggers, the expectations underneath, and how to pull those out of your heart and mind, so you can be a dad who is less angry and more at peace. If you take this course and you do not become less angry, you will get all of your money back. Plus, we’ll send you some boxing gloves, so you can beat up the wall at your house with all of your mad anger. Dad, come take the anger free dad course today at manhoodjourney.org/anger-free-dad. That’s manhoodjourney.org/anger-free-dad.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah and I think what you’re saying is, you in that instance or that thought process, you’re trusting in the process and you’re trusting that God’s got this. He holds it all. He’s got it in his hands. He knows what’s coming around the corner that we don’t and he’s taught you to understand that. That’s where your patience can be generated from.

Kent Evans:
Yeah.

Lawson Brown:
You’re not trying to consult a self-help book on patience and then use discipline on yourself to practice this. It’s that you know you’re not in control. You see that there are some fruits are already beginning to bear and that God’s in control. And so, that trust is a big factor in learning and growing your patience.

Kent Evans:
Well, and I hope a lot of synapses are firing for any dad listening to this. When he hears the word patience, I hope that immediately he’s placing it in the fruit to the spirit that we all know in Galatians and it just says, “The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, general self control.” That idea that patience is in there, reminds us that patience doesn’t come from ourselves. We don’t manufacture more patience. That’s not how that works. How it works is, the spirit causes us to become more patient over time. And I am frequently … I heard some guy say one time, he said, “All you get when you pray for patience, is everything in your life slows down.” I can’t remember who said that and I thought, man, what a great line. That’s God’s way of making you more patient. Yeah. This stuff all slows down. Going back to the metaphor we’re using for today’s episode, this idea of darkroom, that was a process you really couldn’t rush. If you tried to rush that process, you got half pictures, we’ve all had those.

Lawson Brown:
That’s interesting. Yeah. Right.

Kent Evans:
And if you try that, it’s half developed. And I go back to this First Peter reference, when it’s talking about this preciousness, the tested genuineness of your faith. And that one in James, where it says it produces steadfastness. That’s a hard word for me to say, and it produces steadfastness. I love that it says it produces. It just reminds me that’s an increasing bucket over time and that it gets refined and refined. I think a lot of dads are living at a pace that is probably unsustainable mentally. We’re consuming information faster than our brains ought to be consuming it. We’re filling up our calendars. A few weeks ago, I had this crazy series of a couple of weeks, where I was driving, and going, and gone, and a lot of travel all at once. And my wife would very kindly, but obviously say, “You know, you make your own schedule.”

Lawson Brown:
Right. Yeah. I’m in the middle of one of those right now. When I get home Thursday night, it’s over. I’ll be home for two or three weeks, and yeah, can’t wait. And you’re right. How much of this are we creating? How much of our desire for the right now is in our control? How much of it can we? Can we help filter the world around us out, so that maybe we’re not so prone to … In fact, I think it’s funny, you could hardly get through that scripture verse in Galatians about fruit of the spirits, without hurrying up at the end.

Kent Evans:
Shut up, Lawson. Who asked you? Who asked you?

Lawson Brown:
Blah, blah, blah.

Kent Evans:
That’s for the guy who listens to our podcast at 2X speed.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah, exactly.

Kent Evans:
He just heard that at 4X.

Lawson Brown:
Right.

Kent Evans:
Yeah, the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace …

Lawson Brown:
That’s good.

Kent Evans:
Speed that one up now.

Lawson Brown:
I was smiling as you were rushing through that scripture.

Kent Evans:
Golly. You know what’s funny? I have a car. It’s a Toyota Highlander, about five, six years old, and it’s used. It’s a great car. Here’s what’s really funny about the idea of patience. It’s a push-button car. The only reason I say that is because what I usually do is I’ll pull up, and I’m pulling up to some Starbucks or whatever, and I pop open the door, with the car still running, but it’s in park. I put it in park, and then I pop open the door, and then I hit the button. And what was funny is, the car would beep because my door’s open. And I always thought to myself, what a stupid car. I mean the people at Toyota, they are never going to be able to make it if they don’t learn how to make cars that actually work. It would beep and I thought you dumb car. I just told you to turn it off. Don’t you know that I can have my door open now? Here’s what I found out. That little button on the side of the door that knows when it’s closed, then the dome lights go off, and all that. That button is like a quick release for knowing that the door is open, and it barks at you when it thinks you opened the door too soon. And here’s what I realized, the design of the car is such that I should pull up, hit the button, let the engine turn off, and then open my door, and it no longer dings and barks at you. And so here’s what I’ve done to fix the problem-

Lawson Brown:
What a shock. Yeah, it’s not-

Kent Evans:
I know. It’s really not the car-

Lawson Brown:
I know what you haven’t done.

Kent Evans:
It’s not the car.

Lawson Brown:
What you haven’t done is actually slowed down.

Kent Evans:
Look, here’s … Again, who asked you?! Here’s what I’m doing now. Okay, this is Kent 2.0 with his Toyota Highlander. I pull up, car is still running, I pop open the door, I hit the button, it starts to ding, and I reach my left hand and I push the button to tell it that the door has shut, which it hasn’t actually. I go through those motions to keep the car from dinging. When in fact, if I just used the vehicle as the engineers intended for it to be used, none of this would be happening.

Lawson Brown:
That’s so funny.

Kent Evans:
And man, I do the same thing as dad-

Lawson Brown:
You did better than I thought you were going to say, which was I thought you were going to say you duct-taped that button so that it would …

Kent Evans:
Oh! Dude, hang on. I got to go.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah.

Kent Evans:
I got to go find some duct tape. That’s level three. That’s level three, duct tape the button. It reminds me man, that the pace … April, my wife, and I had this conversation a few weeks ago. We’re just … I’m always in a hurry, even when it doesn’t matter. In fact, okay dads, dads let me challenge you with something. I want to challenge all the dads. Join me. Join me. Years ago, I used to use a word that I can’t say on the podcast without offending my wife who listens to this every week, so I’m going to spell it, C-R-A-P. Don’t say it out loud, Lawson. That was a word I used to say too often. Okay. My wife would say once is too often. Okay. About, I don’t know, six, seven years ago, I told my boys, at the time we had four and they were six-years-old and 18, 16, 14ish, and I told them all I said, “Okay, here’s the deal. Anytime dad uses that word, it’s a dollar to the first kid who catches me.” I would say it, and they would go, “Dollar!” And they would scream. It became this, almost neurotic game around our house, because you just never knew when I was going to say that word, and then you never knew which kid was going to scream at me. I think one of my kids made, it was a lot. In one month, as I was getting settled in, in one month he made $75. I mean, some big number to him. They would all fight, and yell, and argue over who said it first. And so just last week, at the time of this recording in November of 2021, just last week … By the way, I don’t use that word hardly at all. That’s a great game to play with your family. If you have a little idiosyncrasy or a word you want to get rid of, play it with your kids at home. It’s fun for them, teaches them a lesson. They make some dough and then you eventually get that word out of your vocabulary. But about a week ago, I told my boys, I said, “All right, we’re going to try a new version of this game. And here’s the new version. It’s not so much about removing a word. It’s about removing a spirit of rushing in our home.” I’ll be out throwing football, Lawson, with my sons in the front yard. There’s no where to be. It’s a sunny day. We have no problems in life. We’re tossing football, and the ball will bounce off, and my kid will walk to get it, and I will say, “Hurry up. Hurry up, get the ball.” Why? Why?

Lawson Brown:
That’s interesting. Yeah.

Kent Evans:
I got nowhere to be. What I told them is I said, “The new one is called the rush dollar. R-U-S-H, the rush dollar. If I rush you and it’s not for if we’re going to church and we got to get in the car. Okay, that’s different. But if I rush you at a time when there’s no schedule, there’s no need to be rushed, that’s the new game.” It just started. It’s less than a few days old. I haven’t had to cash out yet any money, but that’s coming. And so, what I want to challenge dads with, is a little bit of an autopsy and audit of, is this area of development, when we say development and we think back to the old darkroom, are you patient? Are you letting things play out? Are you in a hurry often? If you are, I dare you to challenge your family to catch you in the act of being in a hurry, of rushing, of living at an unsustainable pace. And when that happens, find some way to pull them into a game. It may not be dollars. It could be candy, or movie night, or popcorn, or who knows, but find a way to tangibly reward them for holding you accountable. Join me in the rush dollar challenge.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah, I like that.

Kent Evans:
Cause bro, I’m in the middle of it.

Lawson Brown:
That’s interesting. I’ll ask you about it.

Kent Evans:
Please do. Dads, we hope today’s episode about going into the darkroom of development with your family and being patient has been a blessing, and we hope you have not listened to it at 2X speed. You need to chill out. We will see you next week. Thank you, Lawson.

Lawson Brown:
Take care.

Kent Evans:
Hey dad, thank you for listening to today’s show. If you found this episode helpful, remember you can get all the content and show notes at manhoodjourney.org/podcast. And if you really liked it, please consider doing three things. Number one, share this podcast with someone. You can hit the share button in your app, wherever you listen to podcasts, or just call a person up and tell them to listen in. Number two, subscribe to this podcast, so you get episodes automatically. That helps us as well, to help dads find the show. You do that through your favorite listening app, whatever that is. And finally, review this podcast. Leave us a review, good or bad wherever you listen. Those reviews also help other dads find the show. You can always learn more about what we’re up to at manhoodjourney.org or fatheronpurpose.org. We will see you next week.

Voiceover:
You’ve been dozing off to the Father on Purpose Podcast, featuring Kent Evans and Lawson Brown. Now, wake up, head over to fatheronpurpose.org for more tools that can help you be a godly intentional and not completely horrible dad. Remember, you are not a father on accident, so go be a father on purpose.